The Wall Street Journal scolded President Trump in a Wednesday editorial for tweets promoting a conspiracy theory surrounding a woman who died while working at MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s former congressional office in Florida, calling the president’s allegations “trash” and “ugly even for him.”
“Donald Trump sometimes traffics in conspiracy theories — recall his innuendo in 2016 about Ted Cruz’s father and the JFK assassination — but his latest accusation against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is ugly even for him,” the board wrote.
“Mr. Trump always hits back at critics, and Mr. Scarborough has called the President mentally ill, among other things. But suggesting that the talk-show host is implicated in the woman’s death isn’t political hardball. It’s a smear,” it continued. Mr. Trump rightly denounces the lies spread about him in the Steele dossier, yet here he is trafficking in the same sort of trash.”
“We don’t write this with any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop. Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so,” the board concludes.
The editorial comes one day after the widower of Lori Klausutis, the woman who worked in Scarborough’s office, had asked Twitter in writing to remove the posts by Trump.
Klausutis died in 2001 after an abnormal heart rhythm caused her to lose consciousness and hit her head on a desk in Scarborough’s congressional office in Florida. Her death was ruled an accident.
“My request is simple: Please delete these tweets,” Timothy Klausutis wrote on Tuesday.
Twitter expressed sympathy for the pain the president is causing the family but refused to take down the tweets.
“We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Hill in a statement.
“We’ve been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.”
Trump most recently tweeted about Scarborough and Lori Klausutis on Wednesday.